OBJECTIVES Early estimates of the commercial headroom available to a new medical device can assist producers of health technology in making appropriate product investment decisions. The purpose of this study was to illustrate how this quantity can be captured probabilistically by combining probability elicitation with early health economic modeling. The technology considered was a novel point-o...

This research investigated contents of actor and abstainer prototypes with regard to young adults' social drinking combining quantitative and qualitative approaches (adjective ratings, N = 300; open answers, N = 90). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses yielded two factors (sociability/hedonism, responsibility) in both prototypes, confirmed by qualitative data. Given the importance for ...

Procedures must be developed to ensure that valid informed consent is obtained from participants in HIV vaccine efficacy trials. A prototype informed consent process was evaluated among 4,892 persons at high risk for HIV infection in the HIV Network for Prevention Trials Vaccine Preparedness Study (VPS), a prospective cohort study of HIV seroincidence in eight U.S. metropolitan areas. Twenty pe...

Adolescents are the most fervent users of social network sites, hereby disclosing a lot of personal information. In this study, we used the Prototype Willingness Model to examine whether the sharing of personal information about peer relationships follows a rational and intended pathway, or a more impulsive unconscious decision-making pathway. Data from a sample of 1314 adolescents (M = 16.68, ...

The study was conducted to address the issue of consumers’ willingness to pay for inclusion of cassava flour in bread in Lagos State. The data were collected randomly from a sample of 300 respondents in the state through the use of a well structured questionnaire. The contingent valuation method was adopted to estimate both the mean willingness to pay of consumers and the factors that affect th...

In this study, detection and identification of common faults in industrial gas turbines is investigated. We propose a model-based robust fault detection(FD) method based on multiple models. For residual generation a bank of Local Linear Neuro-Fuzzy (LLNF) models is used. Moreover, in fault detection step, a passive approach based on adaptive threshold is employed. To achieve this purpose, the a...

Mobile number portability (MNP) means that customers using mobile service can retain their telephone numbers when they change operators. Mobile carriers are concerned about which factors influence willingness to churn of customers. This study examined these concerns through three steps. The first is checking whether willingness to churn between the different situations, without MNP and with MNP...

The purpose of this study, funded by the American Cancer Society, was to increase knowledge and understanding, i.e., the willingness and ability to discuss, of breast cancer in southern minority women and their families. A family model of health education guided the research questions. (a) To what extent will an action research intervention increase knowledge about the causes and treatment of b...

In this work, we present an algebraic approach for modeling the two-party cascade protocol of Dolev-Yao and for fully formalizing its security in the specification language of the Prototype Verification System PVS. Although cascade protocols could be argued to be a very limited model, it should be stressed here that they are the basis of more sophisticated protocols of great applicability, such...